How-to Develop IOS 5 Apps with iCloud Capabilities

iCloud is Apple's contribution to the new cloud mouvement that is sweeping the IT world. What is different with Apples's offering is that developers can use it in their own applications without requiring any additional licensing cost other than their developer membership. For those out of the loop, iCloud allows apps running on IOS 5 or Mac computer to sync their content between devices by storing this content on external storage servers.

Apple has made it easy for developers to use this technology and service. The first part of mostly configuration and the second part is adding code to your app, IOS 5 or Mac to copy the content to files that need to be stored in a folder reserved for the apps container or container directory.

iCloud enabling you apps requires that you setup you app in the IOS Provisioning Portal and after creating a new App ID or using the an existing one, head over to the Push Notification Service, it is located at the bottom of the page on the Manage App tab. The table will list your apps and current status of the Push Notification and Gaming Center. Next to these will be the iCloud service. To enable iCloud for a particular app, click on the Configure link and fill out the required fields ad save.

The next step is to a Provisioning Profile for your app as usual and download the provisioning file, it may take a couple of minutes before it ready.

Once the provisioning file is ready and downloaded, add it to Xcode. This done, enable iCloud Entitlements in your app. For the coding, iCloud relies mostly on Document based programming using the UIDocument API. To provide syncing of data for your app, you will need to save the contents for a file in the app container directory.

You can learn ore about this process from IOS 5 | How-To Create and Configure an iCloud IOS 5 app. This guide walks you through the process on how to setup iCloud in your app and in the Provisioning Portal.